The 5-Step Guide To Creating a Buyer Persona | iContact

As you know, your customers aren't all the same. Each one has their own interests and needs. As a marketer, it's your job to know who your customers are so that you can create engaging content that addresses those unique interests and needs. But how can you accomplish that? You can start by creating buyer personas.

What are buyer personas and why are they important?

Before we dive into this 5-step guide to creating your buyer persona, let's briefly explain what exactly a buyer persona is and why they're so important.

A buyer persona is simply a fictional representation of your ideal customer. It's usually based on interests, challenges, and problems that your audience is facing. This persona will then provide a guideline for you when creating marketing campaigns, branding, and content.

As a result, you'll be able to develop more precise and targeted campaigns — which means they'll have a higher probability of succeeding. Just as important, buyer personas can help build a more personal connection with your audience.

Are you ready to start creating your buyer personas? Then let's get this party started with this step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Research your target audience.

Basic profile information about your customers, such as location, gender, and age, is an excellent starting point. But that's just scratching the surface. In order to create a realistic buyer persona, you need to dig a little deeper by doing some research. This allows you to understand why they make purchases, how they make purchasing decisions, and what or who influences them.

To get started, look at your existing customers and email subscribers. Focus mainly on your best customers and repeat customers. What similarities do you notice?

You can answer that question by using your analytics dashboard, blog comments, focus groups, and surveys. This allows you to know your customers so that your personas aren't vague descriptions.

There are two things to keep in mind during this first step.

First, make sure that you never share your customer's information with a third party without the customer's consent. Secondly, you'll want to conduct new research periodically. This way you can refresh your buyer personas with updated information.

Step 2: Narrow down most common details.

Now that you've completed your research, look at the most common details that you’ve collected from your customers and subscribers. This will help you determine how you'll communicate with them.

During this step, you'll want to pay attention to the following information:

Demographics like age and occupation

The geographic location of your audience

Behaviors like the benefits your customers want, how they use your product, and what type of content they consume

The challenges, interests, and values of your audience

Email preferences like when they're most likely to open an email and how often they want to receive marketing messages

By narrowing down the most common details, you'll be able to segment your audience properly. This ensures that the right customer will receive the right message at the right time.

Step 3: Create separate personas.

Your next step is to create separate personas based on the details that you've organized above. This way your audience can be grouped into the right category. Remember, each category will represent different personas.

Keep in mind: Create only as many different personae as your organization can reasonably field — keep realistic goals based on your true business needs and offers, as opposed to "shooting the moon" to attract customers your business cannot rely on. This will focus your efforts and yield truly measurable results.

For example, if you run a non-profit organization, you'll have have some people who want to volunteer for an upcoming fundraiser, while another group is interested in only donating. Since these groups have two different goals, they represent separate personas.

Step 4: Name your personas.

With all this information at your disposal, you can give your personas names. Doing so will remind you that you're communicating with an actual person — which makes it a whole lot easier to compose personalized messages.

For example, your first persona could be named Jill. Underneath the name, you would include her demographic information, occupation, income level, interests, behavior, and whatever relevant background information you’ll need for your campaign.

Personally, I like to add an image or photo to represent each persona. Having a face with the name makes me feel like I really know this person.

Step 5: Start composing personalized emails.

Now that you've got your personas created — congrats, by the way — it's time to start writing personalized emails for each persona. As a result, you'll have a more engaged subscription base because you're only sending them emails that are personalized and contain relevant information.

Again, this ensures that the right people will receive the right message at the right time. For instance, you wouldn't send an email to your donors reminding them to sign up for your annual fundraiser. That message would be sent to those who volunteered last year. Instead, you would send your donors an email highlighting all the good that their donations have done within the past year.

Conclusion

There's no right or wrong way to create your buyer persona. The point is to have a process that will develop a more realistic view of your audience so that you know how to approach and interact with them. Just remember that it all starts with gathering and organizing accurate and relevant information.